Alamid Cafe Xpress is located inside R.O.X. in Bonifacio High Street
There are a number of hobbies that can really hook you. For me, there’s the diving and then coffee. You all know about the former. So let’s talk about the latter. Pulling shots is addicting. I’m addicted. I blame the trance-like whirling sounds of the machine and the smell that fills the room when 16 bars of pressure is applied to a freshly ground batch of arabica. Then there’s the frothing of milk and the pouring that dapples the white with the browns of the coffee’s heart. And of course, there’s the taste. It’s a bitterness only an adult can enjoy embroidered with the image of a horse kicking your senses silly.
UPDATE: Please see rules. I failed to include the limit of characters.
Hello! New year, new contest! And this January, we are starting with Nokia. Nikka Abes of Nokia Philippines has ordered three Nokia X3 Touch and Type phones. SRP is PHP 8,999. The Xseries is the revamped XpressMusic line of Nokia, perhaps the line which I personally find to be most succesful with its value proposition for entertainment. So we have 3 and we’re giving it away. But here’s how it will work.
RULES
1. There will be three winners of three mini-contests. The first contest will end 11:59PM of Wednesday. The second deadline is 11:59PM of Friday and the third will end 11:59PM of Sunday.
2. The contest is FLASH FICTION. If you don’t know what it is, this is the type of creative fiction which you can do with as little words as possible. The limit is 144 characters (including the space and periods, commas, etc) so if your limit is essentially one Tweet. Leave the entries in my comments section.
Example: Perhaps the most famous is the work by Hemmingway which goes something like: For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn.. English / Filipino / Taglish entries are OK. Avoid abbreviations.
As you can see, themes are pretty generic. Have fun!
Clock is based on the timestamp of the comments.
4. I’m choosing the winner. If there are any discrepancies with the rules whatsoever, I’ll have final say with the rules after considering the comments from readers. Winners wil be announced a couple of hours after each mini contest ends, also announcing the beginning of the new series.
5. This contest is open to everyone from the Philippines. if you live outside the PH, we will have to ship the prize to you courtesy of Nokia. They will take care of it. If you won once, you can’t win again. But you can submit as many entries as you wish (you can even combine them if you want). Entries that are heavily offensive / done in bad taste / pornographic won’t be counted. PG-13 allowed.
1. The best way to look at the broadband cap issue is not from a technology perspective but from the perspective of human rights. Before the printing press was invented, the struggle between English and the French / Latin languages was tipped when most of the learned clergy died during the bubonic plague. Since Latin and French were the languages spoken by the few and the learned, only people of the Church were allowed to speak it. The clergy was put in charge of tending to plague victims and hence, also succumbed to it and perished. It was the same with whatever written manuscripts there were — only read and understood by the enlightened, until Wycliffe decided to translate the bible into English. Because of this tip, English prevailed as the new language of the western world since everyone that mattered was dead from the plague. The spoken word, the printing press, and today, the Internet are examples of prime movers – of mediums of communication. Capping it would similar to cutting off your tongue or denying the right to free speech. Very dark ages. If you hamper the medium, you stunt culture. I thought we were all about nation building.
The broadband cap is a last stand effort to cry out, giving existing telcos a chance to compete using sub-par products with attractive marketing lures. I’d go as far as saying that this happens in other industries that eventually translate to policy: the open skies program of the DOT which was heavily criticized by the “old guard” in an effort to save Philippine Airlines from competition. Hr hr hr.
2. On the subject of “illegal downloads” this is a faulty argument. I for one spend money to legally download torrents from legitimate online stores such as Steam and Games for Windows and Battle.net. Sure, people do download illegally. But so do government institutions. Dicks. Implement a policy that rewards people who download legally. Today, downloading 1GB updates is common. Imagine a 5GB / day cap. With crappy Internet, you probably need to download the same file more than 5x without a download manager. Before you know it, you’ve used up your limit because of Internet that doesn’t deliver. So many local businesses need more than 5GB / day. What year are we in? 2001? I don’t know about you — but netizens who are all for the broadband cap live really boring lives online.
3. Am I willing to pay more for better Internet? Of course. But in a country where the “best Internet” is laughable, it is very justified to have providers man up first. You know what? Maybe it should happen. So that new players can come in to offer something much better than the BS we have to cope with.
Walk into a toy store today and you’ll be gladly pleased with how geeky some companies have taken toy making. Especially the educational ones. As Ananya (3 1/3 yrs) seemed to be getting good results with a Vtec learning tool that helps you identify numbers and letters, I wanted to take it a step further with a new investment: the Leapfrog Tag Reading System.
In 2008, a handful of science fiction writers released a collaborative project in audio format, read by the cast of Battlestar Galactica. The product was a shared fiction series called Metatropolis where each author wrote a story based on a future world which they brought to life. The print version was released in 2009. In 2010, a second series was released, called Metatropolis Cascadia, now exclusive to audio. The entire series is read by the cast of Star Trek.
